The Joy of Articulating Research

  In preparing my research article, I relied mostly on feedback from past assignments as well as notes taken during CommLab presentations. Feedback from past assignments was very helpful in showing me where I had gone wrong and in what direction I should take each component. Unfortunately, we did not cover every section in a prior assignment/I also really missed the mark on a few of them, which was where the CommLab notes proved very helpful. The notes provided good information regarding the structure of the sections as well as how I should go about writing them. Unfortunately (yes, again), as vary the days so, too, my note-taking ability, so my CommLab notes were not always the most thorough. I revisited some of the presentation slides and learned the hard way that, while these were great presentations, they make for less great reading material as, well, that wasn’t their intended medium. This wasn’t too harrowing a difficulty though, as they provided some useful information and, where things were still vague, I could look back to my data summary and draw some inspiration from there. 

        Another resource that I used less than the others but that was nonetheless important was the literature. This was mostly to provide context to my introduction and discussion, but it was still among the less helpful of resources that I used. Likely, this is a problem on my end, as I still have a habit of reading the beginning of a paper, getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume of abbreviations and jargon, and then resolving to look for a different one. Going forward, it would be valuable for me to try to improve my comprehension when it comes to reading scientific papers in order to make assignments like the journal club and this a tad less stressful. Either way, though it may have been a lot to do, I experienced a delightful moment of catharsis when combining each of my sections into one doc. Sections that had appeared to be so little suddenly became massive when finally compiled and double-spaced and, at that point, I knew I could be done. That is not to say it wasn’t draining; I found myself for a time unable to think about other things due to the mental energy I’d expended on this assignment, resolving to just sleep rather than attempt to do something else, but I suppose that’s just how these things go. 

        I fear that the somewhat concise nature of me writing this begets the idea that I sat down, simply wrote a research article, then went to do something else. Alas, my thought processes resemble less a train and more a rollercoaster; perhaps still racing, but by no means focused. So while I did have a few delightful periods of focused work, the vast majority of my time was spent trying, unsuccessfully, to will myself to focus interspersed with throwing sentences at a page and hoping they stuck, but hey, it got done.